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Doing business outside the US? LinkedIn adds language tools to company pages

Sixty-seven percent of LinkedIn’s 300 million users are located outside of the US and the site is available in 22 languages including Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and English (both British and US?).

I knew the site had a global audience but didn’t realize that it was such a large part of their business model. If global is part of your business model, you’ll like these new features LinkedIn just added to Company Pages.

First, is language preference targeting. When you post a company update, you can now target members based on their selected language.

Next, LinkedIn has personalized the page feeds so members only see Company Page updates that are appropriate. For example, if a company posts an update about a conference in France, they can choose to only show it to people in France. Looking for new business partners in Japan? One click keeps the message from showing up in Brazil.

These new targeting options are excellent for companies doing business in more than one country, and more than one language. Now, you can create five, language or regionally specific updates and send them all at once without the fear of annoying your followers. This way, each member will only see the message that was intended for them and not a bunch of irrelevant updates. That’s good news for both marketers and the LinkedIn members.

If you’re not offering your services globally, why not? What’s holding you back? Currency, shipping, communication – the internet makes it all so easy. And you may find that there’s a higher demand for your product or service outside the US than in. More customers willing to pay more money? It’s worth the effort.